When I first received the package of memorabilia from Vancouver, B.C. back in 2011, I focussed on the arresting photographs of my distant cousin, Jessie Heading as she was first called, and the mementoes of her early life in Cambridge. It took me a while to realise that the box also held many photographs from the family of the farmer, George Underwood, who Jessie came to marry and whose name her son, William, adopted.
The one extant photograph of George shows him in his work gear standing in front of the substantial farmhouse which he had built on the land he originally bought from the Hudson’s Bay Trading Company in 1888. He had emigrated to British Columbia to try his luck from Glasgow the decade before, and this photograph may have been taken by one of the itinerant photographers, who encouraged their clients to send copies home to their families in Britain and Ireland to show how well they had done for themselves. The Hudson’s Bay Trading Company had cleared and settled land close to Fort Langley on the Fraser River, close to what is now Vancouver. They sold off one hundred acre plots to colonist farmers, like George.
You can see George Ewart Underwood’s name near the bottom left of this record. The conditions for farming in the Fraser Valley were more propitious than he had known at home. He was born in a remote part of what is now Cumbria, very close to the Scottish border. Generations of Underwoods, going back to at least the start of the eighteenth century, had farmed here, and on the Scottish side of the border in Dumfriesshire.
By the 1880s times were tough for farmers in Britain. Many left the land for the cities, others, like George and his brother Peter, emigrated to Canada. Peter took his family with him to the remote territories in what is now called Saskatchewan.
George went alone and remained a bachelor for thirty years, until Jessie Heading aka Mrs.MacDonald arrived on his doorstep to become his housekeeper, and shortly after, his wife. She came by train from Vancouver. When I visited the area in 2017 and again last September, I found the land in this part of Greater Vancouver, was still farmed, and still close to the single track railway line – even though most of the traffic these days in this busy metropolitan hub is by road of course.
While the sons and daughters of Peter Underwood founded a Canadian dynasty, the elderly and childless George did not. William, as my book shows, was not George’s natural son, and neither married nor had children. Jessie claimed that George wanted her and her son to keep the farm after he died, but his blood family had other ideas. His older sister Margaret, who lived in a small village a few miles from Dumfries, kept a close eye on George from afar, sending him regular correspondence, some of which ended up in the box of. memorabilia I came to own. She acted as sponsor to obtain temporary entry into Canada in 1914 for her niece and great-niece to visit George from Washington State over the border in the USA. The Underwood Walkers would inherit the farm, instead of Jessie and William, a few years after his death.
Two letters which Margaret wrote to Jessie in the year after George’s death in 1921 suggest she had little time for the younger woman’s ambition to keep the farm for her son. Most people at the time would have judged that a middle-aged Englishwoman who had spent her life in domestic toil could not run a farm, but there was an edge and righteous anger to Margaret’s words which blaze from the page a hundred years since they were written. She did not want the farm to be inherited by a ‘strange man’s boy’.
So it was that Jessie and William moved to what was little better than a shack on the outskirts of the nearby township of Langley where they lived their whole lives.
George Underwood Walker, Margaret and George’s nephew, and his family arrived to take on the farm as a small cattle ranch in the mid-1920s. He was in his fifties when he arrived in Milner, having spent the prime of his life as an engineer in South Africa, India, and finally Washington State. He clearly hadn’t expected the move to Canada as he had applied to be naturalised as an American citizen a few years before he crossed the border to Milner, B.C. After he died in 1942, the farm was sold. His daughter Anne married into another of the pioneer farming families of Milner, the Muffords.
Please take a look at the photographs here.